Halleck's New English Literature eBook

Much prose fiction was written during the Elizabethan
Age. We have seen that Lyly’s Euphues
and Sidney’s Arcadia contain the germs
of romance. Two of the novelists of the sixteenth
century, Robert Greene (1560?-1592) and Thomas Lodge
(1558?-1625), helped to give to Shakespeare the plots
of two of his plays. Greene’s novel Pandosto
suggested the plot of The Winter’s Tale,
and Lodge’s Rosalind was the immediate
source of the plot of As You Like It.

Although Greene died in want at the age of thirty-two,
he was the most prolific of the Elizabethan novelists.
His most popular stories deal with the passion of
love as well as with adventure. He was also the
pioneer of those realistic novelists who go among the
slums to study life at first hand. Greene made
a careful study of the sharpers and rascals of London
and published his observations in a series of realistic
pamphlets.

[Illustration: A BLIND BEGGAR ROBBED OF HIS DRINK.
From a British Museum MS.]

Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) was the one who introduced
into England the picaresque novel in The Unfortunate
Traveller, or the Life of Jacke Wilton (1594).
The picaresque novel (Spanish, picaro, a rogue)
is a story of adventure in which rascally tricks play
a prominent part. This type of fiction came from
Spain and attained great popularity in England.
Jacke Wilton is page to a noble house. Many of
his sharp tricks were doubtless drawn from real life.
Nashe is a worthy predecessor of Defoe in narrating
adventures that seem to be founded on actual life.

In spite of an increasing tendency to picture the
life of the time, Elizabethan prose fiction did not
entirely discard the matter and style of the medieval
romances. All types of prose fiction were then
too prone to deal with exceptional characters or unusual
events. Even realists like Greene did not present
typical Elizabethan life. The greatest realist
in the prose fiction of the Elizabethan Age was Thomas
Deloney (1543?-1600), who chose his materials from
the everyday life of common people. He had been
a traveling artisan, and he knew how to paint “the
life and love of the Elizabethan workshop.”
He wrote The Gentle Craft, a collection of
tales about shoemakers, and Jack of Newberry,
a story of a weaver.

The seventeenth century produced The Pilgrim’s
Progress, a powerful allegorical story of the
journey of a soul toward the New Jerusalem. Mrs.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689), dramatist and novelist, shows
the faults of the Restoration drama in her short tales,
which helped to prepare the way for the novelists
of the next century. Her best story is Oroonoko
(1658), a tale of an African slave, which has been
called “the first humanitarian novel in English,”
and a predecessor of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.